The smartest of us could in fact mathematically show wether such a computer can even be built. I don't even know if you could create "circuits" using moving switches that are only connected through the emission and detection of signals.

Getting funding for such a research, or getting other people to join such a project might actually be the hardest part.

I suspect if your idea is true it would be hard to prove as a computer system that that has been around for as long as you have suggested would be running within a nano gnats whisker of the Shannon limit: http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2010/explained-shannon-0115 as to look like white noise as near as dammit to us unless we understood the underling code. And speaking personally I would not upload any version of my consciousness that i was planning to have around for a few billion years to an unencrypted version of windoze with its BSD problems I would look more towards a heavily encrypted triple parallel(ie 3 different versions) of Linux at the very least making it even harder to decrypt.

edited to add there are I think prototype photonic switches being worked on with some success tho I cant remember the links or lmgtfy code words that would enable wireless "circuits"

I grabbed my old information theory in biology book when I visited my parents a few weeks ago. It's been ten years since the class but it covers a fair chunk of information theory and also applies it to hearing, sight, and bioinformatics.

Well more like shows how information theory is used in those fields. It is only an introductory textbook but it has the basics I would need to think about this on a more serious level.

My issue is I can't get it out of my head. There is a 99.99999999999999% chance that this is just a dumb idea, I am aware of that. I just can't stop thinking about it.

Have a look at the wikipedia page on bacteria. We all know they are everywhere, but their numbers and distribution is insane.

"There are typically 40 million bacterial cells in a gram of soil and a million bacterial cells in a millilitre of fresh water."

The oceans are full of them from the surface to several hundred meters under the freaking sea floor in the bedrock. They are in the atmosphere from hundreds of thousands to millions of cells per cubic meter of air.

In terms of survivability, a computer system using the cells as "transistor" equivalents (if it is actually possible) would be invincible short for very large planetary collisions. Even then there would be chance of reseeding after millions of years by fragments of crust reimpacting the planet.

This "hardware" has constant energy supply from different sources. We have photochemistry based ecosystems, we have chemosynthesis based on hydrothermal vents or chemical energy inside the crust. It's biomass outweighs all the obvious living stuff. /plants, animals, fungi/

This is why I can't stop thinking about it. It seems to me the perfect long term survival plan for any sentient being or civilisation. You get rid of your frail body, instead you "disolve" it and attach it to the survivability of the most adaptable and most widespread life form in the universe. Single celled organisms. The computing power of such an architecture /again if possible/ seems staggering. You could simulate whatever the hell you wanted, you also could observe the outside world if you felt like it.

The funny part I haven't mentioned yet is going even more batshit crazy with the concept and bringing in cooky quantum magick. What if you could network the "biospheres" you have "infected" throughout the galaxy utilising weird quantum crap we /humans/ haven't stumbled upon yet. So you could have a supercomputer the size of millions if not billions of habitable worlds all covered with single celled organisms living their lives, while this organism is happily tagging along for the ride for the next couple of hundred billion or trillion years /assuming red dwarves indeed have such long lifespans, and they do have habitable planets in stable orbits around them/.

We don't see any alien civilisations out there, cause they all uploaded the moment they discovered the network. And yes aliens are here already, they are traveling around on the "net" checking out new places all the time.

Hehe I have gone completely nuts now.... LOL

Ok maybe I just needed to rant, so I can get back to sanity. After re-reading all that crap, I am convinced it's all just a dumb idea. It's just all those mythologies about after life, bodyless minds, spirits in the woods, reincarnation, "gods" etc would fit quite neatly in with a virtual ever present supercomputer.

box, the peer-reviewed writings of Robert O. Becker, M.D. on bioelectronic phenomena -- framed by the work of his predecessors and successors -- make for a very interesting course of study . I recommend you add them to your reading list, assuming you have the patience to download yet more technical writing into your refried brains!

They emphatically do not support the hypothesis of a planetwide biocomputer, I’m afraid, but they do open the door to a world of intercellular signals beyond the merely chemical. You are likely to find this apparently ubiquitous form of biological communication tantalizingly close to your own concepts for the mechanisms needed to make a “supercomputer embedded in the biosphere” possible.

We don't see any alien civilisations out there, cause they all uploaded the moment they discovered the network. And yes aliens are here already, they are traveling around on the "net" checking out new places all the time.

Actually if your concept is true, they didn't "check out", they "checked in". They would be more inclined to turn inwardly and live either on the nano-scale or in completely synthetic reality/existence. There is no need to travel the real cosmos if you can create a virtual one. So this one supercomputer/intelligence would sit alone contemplating its own metaphorical navel lint.

Quote:

Ok maybe I just needed to rant, so I can get back to sanity. After re-reading all that crap, I am convinced it's all just a dumb idea. It's just all those mythologies about after life, bodyless minds, spirits in the woods, reincarnation, "gods" etc would fit quite neatly in with a virtual ever present supercomputer.

It's not a dumb idea, just not a practical one. One of the biggest problems is address-ability and switching control. If you can't control the flow of information and path of logic, then the most you get are large scale spasmodic activity and unstable state or memory. Even neuro-net computers have this problem.

Yes that is my problem. I have a vague notion of an "architecture", but I don't have the means to properly analyse the notion and it's consequences on how such an architecture might work, if it is even possible.

I have been looking into boolean logic, biological neural networks, and information theory, but these fields are just too vast, I have no idea where to even start.

My mental image is a circuitry that looks very similar to neural networks, with nodes where some logic is performed on information that is propagated on the tendrils of "virtual" wires that the bacteria form. So the bacteria form the nodes of logic, as well as the connections between the nodes. The wires could be hundreds or thousands or even billions of cells "wide". So that would be the simplest way to intorduce redundancy into the system.

Also the "nodes" and the "wires" are actualy virtual, they are not strictly coupled to a physical location. The actual patterns of interaction between a group of bacteria to perform the logic, and the paths themselves can drift or actively move on this physical background of bacteria.

So really there are two computers. The physical architecture of bacteria, their genetic programing and physical operation of emitting and recieving EM signals, and their actual physical position. This creates a blank page of a sort. But then the actual computer is "virtual" in the sense that the wires and higher logic function performing patterns of interactions can move around on this blank background.

So when bacteria move in physical space relative to eachother, this "virtual" computer doesn't have to move with them. Or the other way around, this virtual computer can move while the physical parts are relatively stationary.

For instance in a turbulent substrate like water or air, because the signals of activation and state change between the bacteria travel much faster than the speed they get displaced relative to one another, what happens is that where there is a pathway or corridor of information traveling from node A to node B the cells that form that pathway get constantly replaced. The "wires" aren't rigid physical objects.

Does this make sense? /Not in terms of wether it is possible to make such network, but just wether you get the "mental image"/

As I said before, the issue for me is translating this "image" into a proper model that could be examined to see if it could work, and how it would work. Also how one could evesdrop into this system if it does work.

I guess a good start would be to see if a simple logic gate can be built with parts of constantly moving switches that communicate through wireless signals. Or if you have the logic gates within the cells, then how one connects multitudes of them to perform useful computation while they can just swirl around in a solution.

If that problem is solved, networks in more solid environments like soil or rock, would be relatively easy to figure out.

So I guess the core question is: Can a turbulent solution of wireless switches be turned into a computer?

What is the necessary architecture and logic for the operation of the switches?

And then what is the necessary architecture and logic for the operation of the whole network itself?

I don't know why I waste my time on thinking about such things while knowing that I don't actually have the knowledge to properly tackle the questions. And I also suck at focusing on one problem at a time. My interests just randomly wonder around all the time...

I don't know why I waste my time on thinking about such things while knowing that I don't actually have the knowledge to properly tackle the questions. And I also suck at focusing on one problem at a time. My interests just randomly wonder around all the time...

On the bright side if all us grasshopper minds were properly focused the world would likely catch fire whilst one of use was using the fire extinguisher for propulsion

Back on the subject I think it is hard to communicate exactly how you think something might work unambiguously but I think it was Turing or possibly Von Neumann that basically proved that universally programmable computer could simulate anything if it had enough storage. So if you have the capability of making a wireless switch no matter how it works if it can be connected to other switches you can build up logic circuits of increasing complexity until you have a universal computer. Simulations/Virtual realities no matter what you call them could nested as many times as you would like the trouble is that it would be very hard to work out if you are in one and it gets all philosophical. Even if you do actually find a bug in the code proving a point you might accidentally BSoD us all and not last long enough to get the glory.

_________________Someone has to tilt at windmills.So that we know what to do when the real giants come!!!!

A virtual reality, simulation of "a" reality is really a totally separate problem from AI or neural/non-binary computing and really not related to each other other than most AI experimentation find it expedient to create a simplified virtual environment for their virtual critter to interact with. Yes, theoretically if you had unlimited storage, you could create a high fidelity simulation of our reality marking the exact state of every piece of space all the way down to the sub-quantum scale. But that is really only half of the problem, the other half are the physical properties and how to render it to the observer.

The problem Box with your concept is address-ability and flow control. Without having the ability to set the switches and control the flow, all you can get is nifty looking waves of activity thru them (I am picturing the flashing pigment of a cuttlefish for example). Neurons and even real bacteria do that by actually touching each other or at least sending chemical messages. I don't see how you can dynamically and wirelessly accomplish the same thing because your options are limited. Frequency or multiplexing is limited and would be prone to synchronization errors (even if each one had its own little atomic clock). Overt TCP-like addressing would be... cludgy and you would rapidly run out of addresses before you got anything smarter than a turnip.

If you can figure out the above, get fitted for a tuxedo. You'll need one in Oslo.

A virtual reality, simulation of "a" reality is really a totally separate problem from AI or neural/non-binary computing and really not related to each other other than most AI experimentation find it expedient to create a simplified virtual environment for their virtual critter to interact with. Yes, theoretically if you had unlimited storage, you could create a high fidelity simulation of our reality marking the exact state of every piece of space all the way down to the sub-quantum scale. But that is really only half of the problem, the other half are the physical properties and how to render it to the observer.

The problem Box with your concept is address-ability and flow control. Without having the ability to set the switches and control the flow, all you can get is nifty looking waves of activity thru them (I am picturing the flashing pigment of a cuttlefish for example). Neurons and even real bacteria do that by actually touching each other or at least sending chemical messages. I don't see how you can dynamically and wirelessly accomplish the same thing because your options are limited. Frequency or multiplexing is limited and would be prone to synchronization errors (even if each one had its own little atomic clock). Overt TCP-like addressing would be... cludgy and you would rapidly run out of addresses before you got anything smarter than a turnip.

If you can figure out the above, get fitted for a tuxedo. You'll need one in Oslo.

The flashing pigment of the cuttlefish made me think of Conway's Game of Life. I think it's the best Analogy to how I imagined this system would work.

The real fun part is the videos in this talk involving quorum sensning. The basic method of how bacteria communicate and interact with one another. When I first started thinking about the hacked biosphere I was only considering chemical signal waves traveling through the matrix of the biosphere /didn't consider the wacky idea of dna radio yet/, which this video helps to visualise with real world phenomena. Since different species use different molecules, and some signal molecules work interspecies, there seem to be plenty of room for computation, if not only for us to exploit in the future. http://www.ted.com/talks/tal_danino_we_can_use_bacteria_to_detect_cancer_and_maybe_treat_it

Now to repeat an earlier point. If we are already working on methods to harness microbes to not only do some basic computation, but to carry out a wide range of tasks, then it seems technology automatically "feels" or branches towards pathways that lead to planet sized computers that build themselves and run on whatever energy source is available locally. And if that is the case, and we are just an average technology using species that came about in this galaxy, then the possibility of this already being the case on our planet seem to me very likely.

For me it all just pops out of the marriage of computer science/technology and biology/biotechnology combined with a fairly common occurence of life in the universe.